Four Wrong Ways to Study the New Testament | Revolutionary Bible Study

The title is Four Wrong Ways to Study the New Testament. But there’s much more implied here than that. Revolutionary Bible Study implies also that Bible study previously has not been revolutionary.

But it goes even further…deeper than that. This book is the first of its kind ever written, and the fact that it has taken so long to come up with a new approach to studying the New Testament is nothing less than shocking. The potential is nothing less than the revolutionizing of our faith. Now, what’s been going on that was wrong? I want to trace back the roots of that, and then we’ll move forward and see just how much is implied in what we are facing.

Please go back to about the year 260 A.D. There were very few manuscripts floating around at that time, but someone had the 13 letters of Paul, which were, by the way, the first to emerge that archaeologists can tell us about, and the ones most frequently reproduced. This gentleman walked into a bookbinder and said, “I would like to have Paul’s 13 letters bound together.” What happened after that moment was the greatest single tragedy and stumbling block ever to take place in all the history of Christendom. All else pales in the presence of the disaster that took place when that bookbinder got hold of those 13 letters.

Now, he had a heathen mind. He had a pagan way of looking at binding books. It was what they were doing in those days. If you were to walk into that same bookbinder and ask Aristotle’s works to be bound together, well, they automatically would put the longest treatise of Aristotle first, then the second, then the third, then the fourth. The same would be of Cicero, of Plato, or of Homer. It didn’t matter. They always gave the first place to that which was the longest.

Now, there’s a reason for that, and that is because those treaties were not so much history, or at least every writer would write on a different subject, and those subjects were not connected. Aristotle would write on something like how to make speech – we call it rhetoric—and then he would write on something else about government. Paul’s letters were treated the same way. All of them were treated as though they were not connected to one another, and yet the truth of the matter is that Paul’s letters are more uniquely connected to one another than all the other writings of the New Testament combined.

Anyway, he looked over the letters and correctly decided that Paul’s longest letter was Romans. Forget the fact that it was not Paul’s first letter; it was his longest letter. The bookbinder then looked to find what would be the second longest, and he measured and measured correctly: it was 1 Corinthians, then 2 Corinthians. And then the next one was Galatians, although I’m told he probably missed it by one word; Ephesians might have had one word more in it. It doesn’t really matter. The tragedy was building… Then came Philippians and Colossians, and then, to give you some idea how big a mess that was, the next letters that were sewn together were, in fact, some of Paul’s earliest letters. It went all the way to 2 Timothy, which is the last letter Paul ever wrote. But it’s not the last of the 13 letters that were bound together. The last one was Philemon. And why was it last? Because it was the shortest.

Now, from that day forward, all of Paul’s letters have been published by length, and for 1800 years, no one has ever questioned doing that. Or if they have, they haven’t done it very seriously. Or, at best—and I do believe I own the world’s first chronological New Testament —it was in the late 1800s, and it did not sell. In the last 20 years, we have seen a few New Testaments published, but basically all they did was rearrange Paul’s letters in their proper order, and none of them sold well. There’s been no reason for anyone to understand why we put those letters together chronologically.

Now, let’s see if I can explain this.

You’re familiar with the three letters of John, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. There is virtually nothing in them that gives you any ideas as to when they were written, to whom they were written, or where. The book of James—not a clue. No history in it. Jude—a total mystery. First Peter—quite a bit. Second Peter—absolutely no understanding whatsoever of the setting, the context – that is, the surroundings. This is not true of Paul’s letters. When you put them in their proper order, they’re like a chain brought together, and they tell a story—a story that reaches from the year 50 to the year 63, which just so happens to be also the years when most of the New Testament was written.

Now, what I’m about to say to you is a little difficult to grasp, and it’s something we seem to have totally overlooked. The book of Acts is a history book. Paul’s letters are epistles, or they are “letter” books. History books, and they’re “letter” books. There’s a world of difference. The first four books of the New Testament are biographical. The next one is historical. That’s the book of Acts. But we tend to forget that Acts was not written in the year 30, 40, or even 50. Acts was probably written by Luke somewhere around the year 63 A.D., which means that Luke, writing Acts, had already read many of Paul’s letters before he wrote Acts. He knew the context of at least six of the letters that had been written by the time he closed Luke, closed the book of Acts.

For instance, take the book of Galatians. Luke read Galatians long before he wrote Acts, and when he got to the area where Acts and Galatians came together, he went out of his way to clarify the background to Galatians, and we don’t know that. At least we don’t know it unless we stop and say, at this point in Acts, Paul wrote Galatians. So, two points here: we’ve got to take Paul’s letters out of “length” order to “chronological” order—that is, the sequence in which he wrote them—and then, at least up until the year 63, we need to look at every point in Acts, identify that point where Paul wrote a letter. When we do that, a beautiful, sequential, contextual story begins to emerge, giving us insights we have never had before into Paul’s letters and, consequently, into a large part of the New Testament.